I've had a computer running for the past almost 4 days rendering Hearthstone cards to do a full database update here on Out of Games, and I've uncovered a few fun, updated numbers during it.
- There are 29830 cards in the Hearthstone client as of the most recent patch.
- 22650 of those cards can be rendered.
- Cards like the buffs you see on mouseover on the gameboard, or buttons in Battlegrounds, don't get rendered.
- Only 6249 are classified as being collectible, and a bunch of those are heroes or duplicates for core set.
- 10692 of those cards can be rendered as golden cards.
- 121 of those are Signature cards.
Now what gets a bit weird is we actually have 30510 cards in our database, which is almost 700 more cards than what exists in the client. I haven't had an opportunity to dig into that yet to figure out what the differences are; I'm certain there has to be something interesting there.
Just figured someone might find those numbers interesting. As for why there are so many unplayable cards in the game, well there's this fun thing in game development where devs will make use of an existing feature in the game for something else.
In World of Warcraft, the most famous use of this is how they used to do pathing for NPCs. I'm not sure if it's still done this way because it's been a long time since I've done any logging on the WoW client, but I know in Legion you could actually see some of them if you were "lucky". Blizzard spawns hidden waypoints for NPCs to travel, or for you to collide with when you hit a portal to zone into an instance. In the WoW dev's debugging client view, these NPCs are actually little bunnies.
Fallout 3 also does something funny with their trains. Trains are actually human NPCs that are simply wearing a train as a hat, so in reality the trains are just people running around.
Reusing existing technology saves on development time.
For Hearthstone, Cards takes on a lot of this burden.
- TB_BaconShopLockAll_Button is a card with the name "Freeze" which is the button on the Battlegrounds board that freezes the shop.
- All buttons on the Battlegrounds board are cards internally.
- Buffs like the +2/+2 from Power Word: Feast are cards themselves.
- These are called enchantments internally and all the card ids have an "e" suffix.
We import everything that is in the client into our database so if you take off the collectible filter, you can find cards that don't have images which means they usually have something weird going on.
Note that all the freshly rendered cards are not yet imported to the website as of posting this thread. That's going to take some time to upload and process on our end!
